The dream always begins the same.
A sky split open, bleeding light like a wound that will not close. Fire crawling across the horizon, devouring towers that once touched the stars. And beneath it all, the sound of her name whispered through the ash.
Nyra.
Liora breathes it before she can stop herself. Even now, two years after the night the world burned, that name tastes of salt and smoke on her tongue. It should have faded—like the rest of her visions—but it hasn't. It clings. It sings. It hungers.
She stands in the dream's ruin, bare feet sinking into blackened earth. Around her, the corpses of angels rot into the soil, their wings curling like wilted petals. The air shimmers with heat, and from the heart of the ruin rises a figure of flame—a woman, her eyes molten gold, her hands trembling as if she is holding the world together through sheer will.
Nyra.
But she is not the same. The fire has claimed her fully now. Her veins pulse like molten rivers, her hair moves with the breath of the inferno, and her gaze is both fierce and hollow. She opens her mouth as if to speak, but the words come out as embers that scatter into the wind.
Liora takes a step closer. The ground groans beneath her. "You're calling me," she whispers. "But for what?"
The figure's hand lifts—delicate, doomed—and the world fractures.
A thousand images flood through her: Kael, bleeding in the dark, eyes fevered with something not entirely human. A tower of black stone rising from an ocean of glass. The mark on Nyra's wrist burning until it cracks. And beyond it all—a shadow, deeper than night, breathing. Watching. Waiting.
Then, a voice. Not Nyra's. Not Kael's. Something older.
"The Flame was never yours to bear, child. It remembers its true master."
The heat turns cold. The fire collapses inward, swallowing the world whole.
Liora screams—
and wakes to darkness.
Her chamber is still. The candles have melted to wax puddles. She can taste smoke in the back of her throat. The air hums faintly with power—residual, faint, but real. She rises from her bed, her body trembling as the last of the dream clings to her skin.
On the far wall, her scrying mirror shimmers to life without her touch. A single image burns across its surface: a sigil, drawn in fire. The same one she saw years ago when the world first burned—the mark of the Bloodbound.
And beneath it, a single whisper curls through the air.
Soft. Female. Familiar.
"Find me."
Liora's heart clenches.
The Flame is stirring again.